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In Books, History

Ben Park’s American Zion and different trajectories the Church could have taken

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

I recently read Benjamin E. Park’s new history of the Church (in the US mostly), American Zion. It was such a great read! Of course as a Mormon who’s attended church for decades and has even read a little academic Mormon history, I was familiar with a lot of the events in broad strokes, but Ben (I’m acquainted with him, so I’m going to call him that) brought in all kinds of interesting context and information about periods of time especially where my knowledge was really thin. And I was also especially interested to read how he thought about events in the last couple of decades, when I’ve been blogging about Mormon stuff and at least generally following the trends of what’s going on in and around the Church.

Here’s an example of broader context Ben brought in that I found interesting. When the Church went to the state of Ohio in 1836 to ask for a banking charter, it was a time of a lot of pressure on banks in general because Andrew Jackson had successfully defunded the national bank. People everywhere were scrambling to work out how to handle financing issues. The state granted zero banking charters during that legislative session. So it wasn’t just that they were out to get the Mormons. It was that it was a difficult time and they were caught up in a difficult situation that made hard times for a lot of people. I love reading this kind of context because I feel like so much of my knowledge of Church history and secular history more broadly (both of which are admittedly pretty thin) are in silos in my head, and it really opens up my understanding when a historian like Ben connects the appropriate dots to make the Mormon experience make more sense in the context of the US (or the world).

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In Books

Ten things I loved about Steve Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

I recently read Stephen C. Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor. I’m acquainted with the author, so I’m going to refer to him as Steve, because it would sound strange to my ear to call him Taysom. Also, I’m going to follow his convention of referring to Joseph F. Smith as JFS.

  • I appreciate that Steve takes his readers seriously enough to occasionally introduce a theoretical framework for understanding an event in JFS’s life. For example, when talking about the Mormon diaspora that followed the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, he first briefly discusses diasporas in general and the idea of returning to a homeland, and then shows how Mormons were both thinking of returning to a particular place, and also to an imagined one, an idealized version of the United States. Or again, when talking about how JFS made sense of the Manifesto, both for himself and for Mormons in general, Steve first refers to a historian who’s thought about meaning-making in Judeo-Christian religions more generally, before getting into applying the historian’s ideas to the particular situation JFS was in.

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In Books, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Books on GoodReads

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

I wrote a post a couple of years ago where I looked at how Mormon-related movies were rated on IMDB. I thought it would be fun to do a similar look at how Mormon-related books are rated on GoodReads.

I got ratings for 568 books, mostly Mormon-related, but with a few others for comparison. The Mormon-related ones were scriptures, Church-published materials like manuals, and books by GAs, Mormon studies people, and popular Mormon authors (e.g., Jack Weyland, Anita Stansfield). The non-Mormon ones were a few Bibles, the Left Behind series, the top 10 fiction and non-fiction books on the GoodReads lists (I’m not sure exactly of the criteria for these), and 20 fiction and 20 non-fiction books I was hoping would be more representative of average books, so I chose them off of GoodReads user-created lists that had nothing to do with the book content (one was strange titles and the other was interesting covers). I required a book to have at least 50 ratings to be included, although I made exceptions for three extra bad ones I was interested in: the ERA-era book Woman, written by a bunch of GAs, the priesthood/temple-ban-justifying Mormonism and the Negro, and the mansplained classic Woman and the Priesthood. Note that I’ve gathered this data in bits and pieces over the last month or so, so some of the numbers might be a little out of date.

I assigned the books to categories depending on how Correlation-friendly they were. Unfortunately, I’ve only read a small fraction of the books, so I didn’t have firsthand knowledge in most cases. However, most books make pretty clear what type they are. For example, Mormon studies books are typically published by university presses. More correlated books are typically published by Deseret Book or Shadow Mountain. Anyway, this table shows, for all the Mormon books, the number of books in the sample and their average rating on the 1-to-5 scale used by GoodReads.

In my post on movies, I speculated that there would be higher ratings for movies produced by the Church, or that were scripture-adjacent, and that did turn out to be the case. It looks like there’s a similar pattern here, as scriptures rate the highest, and generally categories rank lower in average rating as they move further from being correlated. Here’s a brief explanation of what falls into each category:

  • Scriptures — LDS scriptures in different forms (e.g., Book of Mormon separate vs. Triple Combination) plus some non-LDS editions of the Bible.
  • Correlated — Church manuals and books that have essentially become manuals (e.g., Jesus the Christ).
  • GA biography — Biographies of GAs.
  • Near correlated — Nearly all books by GAs, as well as books by people like John Bytheway who are striving to be correlated, and novels by writers with similar goals (Gerald Lund, Chris Heimerdinger).
  • Correlation friendly — Books that aren’t quite trying to be correlated, but are still very Church-friendly, like many of the Givens’s books, Hugh Nibley, and some of Patrick Mason’s.
  • Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who’s still Mormon (e.g., Leonard Arrington’s Adventures of a Church Historian).
  • Mormon studies — Any look at a Mormon topic from a scholarly perspective, so for example Maxine Hanks’s Women and Authority, or John Turner’s biography of Brigham Young, or Kathleen Flake’s book about the seating of Reed Smoot in the US Senate.
  • Ex-Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who left Mormonism, regardless of hostility level, so everything from Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints to Katie Langston’s Sealed.
  • Not correlation friendly — This includes books with ideas that GAs would generally frown on, even if the writers aren’t hostile to the Church, so for example anything by Carol Lynn Pearson that’s too kind to gay people or too open to Heavenly Mother or rejecting polygamy.
  • Anti — The only book I got in this category is Ed Decker’s classic The God Makers.

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